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JavaScript Internals: Garbage Collection

Garbage collection (GC) is a very important process for all programming languages, whether it’s done manually (in low-level languages like C), or automatically. The curious thing is that most of us barely stop to think about how JavaScript — which is a programming language, and hence, needs to GC — does the trick. Like the majority of high-level languages, JavaScript allocates its objects and values to memory and releases them when they’re no longer needed. But, how?

Asynchronous Javascript: From Promises to Async/Await

Javascript is a funny language. It claims to be (and very much is) a single-threaded language (i.e., it executes statements in order, one at a time, one after another, in a synchronous fashion). Despite just having the one native thread to work with, it somehow allows you to write concurrent, asynchronous code that is non-blocking in nature.

Robust JavaScript Error Handling. Learn About JavaScript Errors

By combining custom errors, named functions and Bugfender, you can create a robust error-handling process that allows you to immediately identify the defects of your JavaScript apps. Unhandled JavaScript errors will stop the execution of your script, leaving the application in an undesired state – or, even worse, in an unknown state. So you need a robust error-handling process to avoid unknown errors in your apps. But, why are errors thrown anyway?

Angular: How to Use Virtual Scroll With a Flat Tree?

While developing Kraken’s frontend I quickly stumbled upon performance issues with Angular Material tree when too many nodes where opened. Kraken is an open source load testing IDE. As such, it displays a tree of directories and files used to script the load testing scenarios: You can have a look by creating a free account on the demo or check the source code of the UI on GitHub. It uses the latest version of Angular and components provided by Angular Material such as the tree.

How to Create a JavaScript Library. 7 Tips to Create a Library That Every Developer Loves Using

Have you ever found yourself copy-pasting the same bits of JavaScript code between different projects? Well, when this situation happens two or three times in a row, it’s usually a good indicator that you have a piece of code that is useful and reusable. So, if you are already reusing your code across several different projects, why not go the extra mile and convert it into a library that allows you to optimize this code-sharing?

A Deep Dive Into V8

A majority of front-end developers deal with this buzzword all the time: V8. A big part of its popularity is due to the fact that it led JavaScript to a new level of performance. Yes, V8 is very fast. But, how does it perform its magic and why is it so responsive? The official docs state that “V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, written in C++. It is used in Chrome and Node.js, among others”.

Using MQTT on Angular Apps

When you’re building a website that needs to be updated in real-time, your first thought is probably to add WebSockets to your application. However Websockets is a low-level protocol and to use it, you’ll need to add another layer on top to manage the information you want to get. This is where MQTT is handy, as it’s a higher-level protocol that simplifies working with data streams.

JavaScript Growing Pains: From 0 to 13,000 Dependencies

In today’s post, we’re going to demystify how the number of JavaScript dependencies grows while we’re working on a relatively simple project. Should you be worried about the number of dependencies? Keep in mind that this blog post is related to the Ride Down The JavaScript Dependency Hell blog post that was released a while back. We’ll show a “real-world” example of how a project’s dependencies can grow from zero to 13K.

Building an AngularJS application using the DreamFactory REST API backend

If you’re building an AngularJS application, you’ve landed on the right page. Now that DreamFactory 2.0 is live on Bitnami, our team has been busy building example apps to show how easy it is to use DreamFactory as your REST API backend. I’ve been working on DreamFactory’s AngularJS sample address book app and tutorial. This blog summarizes a few important things to know about getting started with the DreamFactory Angular sample app.